VENICE — What’s new in contemporary art? Old. We’re in an age of remake culture, an epidemic of re-enactment fever. Young painters are working in styles that were hot half a century ago. Yesteryear’s performance art is being re-performed. Exhibitions that have been done and done — on Matisse, Picasso, European abstraction — are being done again.

Has the art industry, noted for its nanosecond memory, suddenly become history-conscious? Is the art market, like Hollywood, nervous about anything but proven brands? Is art just plain out of ideas? Whatever the answer, the replicants keep arriving, a recent and particularly ambitious one being an ultrafastidious reconstruction of the 1969 show “When Attitudes Become Form,” at the Prada Foundation in Venice.

The original version, which took place in Bern, Switzerland, has a near-mythical reputation as a late-20th-century landmark. It brought together some of the most adventurous young European and American avant-gardists of the day, exponents of post-Pop, post-Minimalist, supposedly anti-market trends like Conceptual and Process art. It presented them at a high moment of political and cultural turmoil internationally, and in what has been perceived as a radically loosened-up exhibition format, with art created communally, spontaneously, on the spot.

The actual event was fairly low-key. Bern was no one’s idea of an art capital. The exhibition site, a kunsthalle built in 1918, was drably undistinguished. The show opened in the gray month of March, ran for barely a month and drew only a small, bemused crowd.

Puzzlement was understandable. The work, by almost 70 artists, jammed into two floors and a nearby annex, wasn’t quite sculpture and certainly wasn’t painting. Its mediums included ice, fire, broken glass, lead, leather, felt, fluorescent tubing, peas, charcoal and margarine. Ropes snaked through rooms; electric wires wound down a staircase. Nothing was framed or on pedestals or behind stanchions, and visitors trampled on work, though it was hard to tell where the art ended and the damage began.

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BERN, 1969 The artist Alighiero Boetti with installations, pictured at top, in the original show.CreditShunk Kender/Roy Lichtenstein Foundation

Some damage was art. A piece by the American “earth artist” Michael Heizer consisted of craters punched with a wrecking ball into the pavement outside the museum. While popular reaction over all ranged from grumpiness to hilarity, officialdom took a more serious view. Certain kunsthalle staff members were so outraged that they effectively forced the resignation of the institution’s director, Harald Szeemann, who was also the exhibition’s curator.

Too late. Word had spread through the art world. The show — its full title was “Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form: Works, Concepts, Processes, Situations, Information” — was instant history, a radical moment.

It is partly as a monument, an artifact, that the Prada Foundation has remade the exhibition, laboriously tracking down existing art, commissioning artists to recreate pieces and asking the estates of deceased artists to supply duplicates of lost or fragile work.

This harvesting could, on its own, have been an enlightening archival exercise or merely a bore. In any event, the three people in charge of the Prada project — the curator Germano Celant, who worked with Szeemann in 1969; the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas; and the German artist Thomas Demand, who photographs full-scale architectural sculptures made from paper. They decided not only to reassemble the contents, but also to recreate the physical context, the kunsthalle galleries, inside the Prada Foundation’s Venetian premises: an 18th-century palazzo, Ca’ Corner Della Regina, on the Grand Canal.

So they have, in “When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013,” which combines wonkish verisimilitude with strategic imprecision. The Bern galleries have been reconstructed on exact one-to-one scale within the palazzo, but are spread over three floors, rather than two, as in Bern. In addition, the kunsthalle annex, the Schulwarte, which in 1969 held work that arrived too late for the main show, has been reimagined as a loftlike space on a fourth floor.

And while details of the Bern galleries — door frames, floor designs, all-over white paint, even radiators — have been copied, the gallery walls are treated like stage flats, with their edges cut out as if with a jigsaw, to accommodate the palazzo’s ornate columns and cornices. Also, the inserted galleries have no ceilings: Look up and you see 18th-century Italian arches and frescoes.

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Pino Pascali’s “Confluenze” (1967) at the Prada Foundation in Venice. In the original 1969 “When Attitudes Become Form” show in Bern, Switzerland, this work was housed in the annex.CreditGianni Cipriano for The New York Times

Within this setting, Mr. Celant, guided by memory and photographs, has installed each piece of art in the precise spot it occupied 44 years ago. When an item is absent, its place is marked on the wall or floor. Among the few works entirely missing are those like Mr. Heizer’s, which physically disrupted the kunsthalle exterior or the area around it. At the same time, the Prada’s nesting of architecture inside architecture is itself a disruption, and a clever one. It turns replication into a form of rethinking about art past and present, and about how myths are made.

We can see, for example, that the show’s reputation as improvisatory and chaotic is ill founded. The planning was careful. Certain galleries were focused on older figures, like Joseph Beuys and Edward Kienholz, who could be seen as progenitors of the younger artists. A space was assigned to classical Minimalists and Conceptualists, like Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt. A contingent of Arte Povera artists, mostly Italian, had a space of their own. The largest gallery of all held a concentration of young Americans: Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Alan Saret and Walter De Maria (who died last month) among them.

Nor was the show politically radical. Little of the work was topical. The artists were almost exclusively white and Euro-American. Only three — Hesse, Jo Ann Kaplan and Hanne Darboven — were women. In addition, far from being a countercultural bootstrap affair, the show floated on a cloud of money. A selection of documents displayed on the Prada foundation’s ground floor reveals that Philip Morris, the tobacco company, footed a chunk of the bill, in an early example of big business wearing avant-garde art as a feather in its cap.

This is a routine public relations arrangement today. The Prada exhibition — and indeed many other products of remake culture — can be taken as a prize example of it, a pricey cultural stunt that serves to burnish a corporate reputation. Does that devalue the show entirely? No. I learned a lot from it.

I learned about the value — the dollar value and, you might say, the spiritual value — of myth. I learned that Szeemann’s show, enshrined by history, now re-enshrined by Prada, was not quite the avant-garde ideal it was cracked up to be. Rather, it was the end of that idea and the beginning of another. It was the end of a brief, illusory effort by art to create an existential economy outside the market, and the beginning of art business as we know it now.

And I learned a lot from seeing the early, and in most cases best, work of various artists I love, and seeing them in a context of intimate conversation. (The catalog, with hundreds of photographs of artists installing work in Bern in 1969, is the show’s most moving element.) I was reminded that, although packaged, sold and cryogenically preserved over time, this work was once tough, one-off, art-questioning, refusenik attitude and expansive thinking. So were the people who made it. So are some artists still.

You are reminded of that in Venice, and — though I don’t want to get romantic — it restores your faith.

Correction:

A critic’s notebook article on Wednesday about the reconstruction of a 1969 art show in Bern, Switzerland, “When Attitudes Become Form,” at the Prada Foundation in Venice, referred incorrectly to the work of the artist Thomas Demand, one of the people in charge of the reconstruction. He photographs full-scale architectural sculptures made from paper, not miniature re-creations.